With more available broadband and high-speed Internet connections and the proliferation of portable electronic devices such as smart phones, tablet computers and notebook computers, video instant messaging is used by many users for real-time communications over the Internet. Video instant messaging is a type of instant messaging (IM), which is a real-time online communication service. Video instant messaging provides advance features in addition to those provided by text IM by enabling real-time visual communications via audio and video capturing the communications of multiple users.
The wide usage of video instant messaging has highlighted a number of challenges including efficiently processing video messaging invitations/requests and responses. It is common that a user of an IM service, including video instant messaging, may have more than one communication device/terminal, e.g., a desktop computer and a smart phone, which can receive and respond to an IM invitation though one single IM service account. When an IM invitation is sent to a user's IM service account, the multiple communication terminals of the user may all receive the invitation. Existing solutions in such a situation allow multiple communication terminals of the user to respond to the invitation. However, one communication terminal's response to the invitation is not known to other communication terminals, which may continue to try to respond to the invitation, resulting in a degraded user experience.